Despite a growing interest in the question of tool-use development in infants, no study so far has systematically investigated how learning to use a tool to retrieve an out-of-reach object progresses with age. This was the first aim of this study, in which 60 infants, aged 14, 16, 18, 20, and 22 months, were presented with an attractive toy and a…

In this study, the development of comprehension of essential and nonessential aspects of counting is examined in children ranging from 5 to 8 years of age. Essential aspects, such as logical rules, and nonessential aspects, including conventional rules, were studied. To address this, we created a computer program in which children watched counting…

Does learning to read influence one's visual skill? In Study 1, kindergartners from Hong Kong, Korea, Israel, and Spain were tested on word reading and a task of visual spatial skill. Chinese and Korean kindergartners significantly outperformed Israeli and Spanish readers on the visual task. Moreover, in all cultures except Korea, good readers…

Tested children's transfer of training in performance of coincidence-anticipation task. At an experimental apparatus, children attempted to intercept a fixed or moving target by pressing a button or by sliding a disk (the criterion task). Found that improved accuracy in intercepting the moving target by sliding the disk occurred only when children…

Examined preschoolers' strategic behavior on a task in which they must decide whether two arrays are the same. Results indicated that the course of strategy development is complex, there is much diversity within a child and among children in both strategy production and strategy utilization, and that children act in ways that are counter to…

Third-graders showing negligible mastery of multiplication combinations were randomly assigned to two groups which practiced different subsets of combinations. Retest results were inconsistent with Siegler's (1988) proposal that item-specific computational practice is necessary to change error patterns and promote mastery. Results suggested that…

For this study, computer technology was used to teach attentional skills to six young children. Prior reinforcement histories of individual stimuli were manipulated to examine whether they are the variable that controls the features of compound cues to which young children attend. (RWB)

In one experiment, subjects from third grade through college relied on memory retrieval rather than on counting to solve multiplication problems. An effect of confusing problems on error rates and reaction times indicated the activation of related information. In a second experiment, subjects demonstrated automaticity of fact retrieval on simple…

The objective of this research was to explore whether orthographic learning occurs as a result of phonological recoding, as expected from the self-teaching hypothesis. The participants were 32 fourth- and fifth-graders (mean age = 10 years 0 months, SD = 7 months) who performed lexical decisions for monosyllabic real words and pseudowords under…

Three preschoolers performed four sorts with stimulus cards--an untaught target sort and three directly taught alternating sorts considered to self-instruct the target performance. Accuracy increased first in the skill sorts and then in the untaught target sorts. All subjects generalized to new target sorts. Correct spontaneous self-instructions…

Studied transfer of rule knowledge in 7- to 9-year-old normal and disabled readers. Compared performance on trained exemplars and untrained transfer items by means of posttests following rule training. Found that normal readers transferred rule knowledge in reading and music tasks; disabled readers were proficient only on music tasks and showed…

Examined development of multiplication skills in 8- to 12-year-olds taught by discovery methods. Found a general shift away from less effective strategies across ages 8 to 12, but by 11 years, relatively few used the most effective strategy of retrieval for all operands. Effective strategy development was related to nonverbal reasoning ability and…

Children aged four through six years were given identical addition and subtraction calculations presented in three problem-type formats: nonverbal problems, story problems, and number-fact problems. Results suggest that children's earliest calculation ability is based on experiences combining and separating sets of objects. Contains 34 references.…

Children in grades three through five and adults performed a number-matching task. Found that changes in the strength of arithmetic connections occurred with development and accounted for individual differences among adults. Individual differences among children were related to changes in the strength of number-line connections. (Author/GLR)

Two experiments assessed visuomotor sequence learning in 4- to 10-year-olds using a serial reaction time (SRT) task with random and sequenced trials. Found that children demonstrated sequence-specific decreases in RT. Participants with explicit awareness of the sequence at the session's end showed larger sequence-specific RT decrements than…